The remarkable story of Warli art !

Popularised by the indigenous artist Jivya Soma Mashe (whose work recently joined the Societe Generale Collection in 2015), Warli painting is now spreading beyond the borders of India. A return to a tribal art with its origins in rock painting, its contemporary form allies tradition and innovation, simplicity and virtuosity.

Less well-known
than its counterpart in Australia, Indian indigenous art is most clearly
embodied in Warli painting, with its famous white pigments against a red
background. An ethnic group from the state of Maharashtra (150 km north of
Mumbai), the Warlis are descended from the first inhabitants of the Indian
peninsula, the Adivasi. Today they number about 300,000, living together in small
villages and subsisting on livestock farming, fishing and agriculture. With
their animistic beliefs, they venerate nature, which they honour through a
ritual practice of drawing.

From huts to canvases

Traditionally,
Warli painting was not meant to be contemplated or preserved. It began in the
shadows of mud-brick huts, done by women at weddings to ensure stable
marriages. The women would sing and draw directly on the walls using bamboo
sticks onto which a mixture of white rice paste, water and gum had been
applied, with a combination of cow dung and earth serving as a solid
background. Once the ceremony was over, these drawings, with their codified and
rudimentary iconography, would fade away naturally. Paintings were also done at
births and to protect crops and houses from evil spirits. These were always
done as part of a ritual - the act and time of the painting took precedence
over the look of the final image and any aesthetic considerations.

But in the
1970s, Warli art underwent a remarkable transformation under the joint impetus
of the Indian government, which decided to promote its indigenous heritage, and
Jivya Soma Mashe (born 1934), the first man to dedicate himself to this
exclusively feminine art. Other artists followed in his footsteps, enabling the
Warli community to develop a new source of income. Now portrayed on canvas,
Warli painting has lost its ephemeral and votive character, although it still
maintains the spirit of an ancestral tradition. Acrylic now supplements the
natural materials used. This expansion of Warli art has led to it being shown
in Paris (for exhibitions at the Musée du Quai Branly and the Fondation Cartier
in 2010 and 2012) and Lyon, where one of its greatest representatives of the
present day, Shatanram Tumbda, painted a colossal fresco on the front of the
Musée Urbain Tony Garnier. Having given up this practice which was originally
their domain, women are increasingly regaining their place alongside the male
artists.

Stories told through circles, triangles
and squares

Wassily
Kandinsky dreamed of points and lines; Cézanne dedicated himself to the sphere
and the cone. Warli artists, for their part, paint in an endless variety of
three simple geometric shapes: the circle (inspired by observations of nature),
the square (indicating a sacred enclosure) and the triangle (used to represent
the human body: a triangle pointing down for the torso, one pointing up for the
pelvis). Perspective is absent - instead, the viewer sees a palette limited to
two colours and a flat surface where figures drift about, resembling
pictograms. Distance serves to indicate time. In this respect, nothing has
changed for centuries. The stylised vocabulary of Warli painting is animated by
a network of broken lines giving the impression of movement. It is
time-consuming, minutely detailed work used to tell a mythological tale appealing to earthly and heavenly powers.

In addition to
the traditional motifs – divinities and day-to-day scenes of women nursing, men
cultivating rice fields, etc. – elements of modern life are now seen more
frequently, such as the arrival of trains in the region and the discovery of
air travel, painted with humour by Shatanram Tumbda. Painters integrate
protective spirits (the sun, the rain) into their own dreams and stories. The
tiger god, called upon to protect livestock, is seen alongside the peacock god,
a symbol of prosperity, or the five-headed horseman god. At the centre of the
canvas, within an elaborate square (the caukat or cauk), the
mother-goddess of fertility, Palaghata (identifiable by her root-limbs,
which look like simplified rakes), or her avatar, the tree of life, Banyan,
has pride of place. Often, figures are seen dancing to the sound of the tarpa
(a wind instrument with a curved end) in a spiral shape, celebrating the
harmony between humanity and the forces of the cosmos. For although each being
has a defined space on the canvas, everything remains inextricably linked to
these tribal painters: the world is in symbiosis with nature.

Caught in the snares of Jivya
Soma Mashe

Jivya Soma
Mashe, the father of contemporary Warli art, has become known for his paintings
portraying fishing nets - enormous domes of white lace taking up almost the
entire canvas. In 2015, Societe Generale acquired one of his works, Fishnet,
for its Collection. At the top of the net (enlarged to the size of a hut or
celestial sphere), the viewer can just make out a fisherman, focused on his
task. The disproportion suggests the fragility of humans in the face of the
immense ocean. Below, the water teems with fish. Nature, while terrifying, can
also be generous. The waves cause the canvas to shimmer. "Day and night,
there is movement. Life is movement," says Jivya Soma Mashe, a fitting
spokesman for the creative dynamism of the Warli culture.